Insects Inspire Flying Robots

Frankenfly: This hull reconstruction depicts the volume that is carved out by extending each of three fruit fly shadows in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the image. Such images are used to determine the coordinates of the fly's wing and body positions as a function of time.

Credit: Leif Ristroph and Attila Bergou.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in
partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Itai Cohen studies soft,
condensed matter. The research topics he investigates range from flows in gels
and pastes, to tissue mechanics, to animal movement.He is obsessed with motion. Currently a professor in the
Cornell Physics department, he recently helped discover that the
crystalline silicon sheets in semiconductors, the foundation of modern
computers, might be grown more smoothly by managing the random darting motions
of atomic particles that control crystal growth. Electrons travel better in
smoother materials, leading to faster electronics and greater energy
efficiency. You can read more about the work, just one of the projects Cohen
has pursued in recent years, here and you
can read his answers to the ScienceLives 10 Questions below.

What inspired you to choose this field of study?
What inspired me to pursue this career is the feeling I get
when I make a discovery. There is something awesome about sitting there with
your apparatus and seeing something that no one else in the world has ever seen.
These moments are full of giddy anticipation. It’s as though you had some juicy
piece of gossip and you are the reporter that gets to reveal this secret to the
world.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?
There was a line in “Star Trek the Next Generation” that I
always remember. Q appears on the Enterprise and tells Captain Picard that the
fate of humanity depends on how he and the crew of the Enterprise perform on
their next mission. Number 1 then asks Picard what he would like them to do
differently to which Picard answers: “Nothing. If we're going to be damned,
let's be damned for what we really are.”

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?
I devised an experiment to determine whether or not there
was a tooth fairy. At night I had gone to bed with a tooth under my pillow and
when I woke up sure enough the tooth was gone and a crisp dollar bill was lying
in its place. I took the dollar bill and slid it between the sheet and the
mattress. I then went downstairs and in a really whiney voice explained to my
parents that the tooth fairy had stolen my tooth and didn’t leave me anything
in return. At that point my dad ran up the stairs and searched all around my
mattress muttering, “I know I put it here somewhere.”

Case closed.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or
researcher?
There is nothing close to the feeling you get when you make
a discovery. When I was a graduate student and a postdoc, I was the first
person to be in on the discovery. Now that I am an advisor, I get to be the
second person to be let in on the secret. I also get to see the sense of
satisfaction on my students’ faces. Being able to share that experience with my
students and enabling them to continue to make new discoveries is wonderful.

What is the most
important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an
effective scientist?What is nice about
this field is that it can accommodate all sorts of different styles and
personalities. The most important thing for me personally is that my research
be creative and beautiful. There are many successful scientists, however, who
are just great at doing repetitive studies, or slogging through difficult
calculations that many would consider less creative. We need these different
types of personalities and methodologies to advance the field as a whole.

What are the societal
benefits of your research?
My research area is fairly applied. Our work on droplet
breakup was funded by P&G, because they want to know how to concentrate
detergents and still have the soap disperse uniformly. Our work on colloidal
crystallization may have implications for growing thinner, more defect-free
films. Our work on insect flight may inspire simple solutions to the control of
flying robots. Our work on cartilage may help in determining how diseases such
as osteoarthritis progress. In addition, I am helping to develop the next
generation of scientists so that they can tackle the problems of tomorrow.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a
researcher? My Ph.D. advisor Sid
Nagel. You don’t go through six years of intense discussions day after day
without picking something up. Thanks Sid.

What about your field
or being a scientist do you think would surprise people the most?I think most people
have this idea that science is about going to the lab, measuring something, and
then reporting that measurement. There is no sense that science is about
creatively interpreting your data and trying to squeeze some sort of picture
out of it that corresponds as closely as possible to what is really happening. When
we take a video of a fly in mid air, we still need to do some pretty creative
footwork to figure out what it is doing in 3D. All we have to work with is a 2D
representation of the insect. Once we have a faithful representation of the 3D
motion we still need to figure out what it means. All of these steps demand an
incredible amount of creativity and ingenuity. People do get the sense that
science is hard but they think it is hard because of the math. The math is easy.
Coming up with creative solutions to these experimental challenges is hard.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning
office or lab, whatwould it be?
My artwork. We tend to take photographs of our experimental
phenomena. Whether it’s a drop dripping from a faucet, or a fly hovering in the
air, the beauty expressed by these images represents the reason I am in this
field.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?
My favorite artist is Leonard Cohen. When that’s not
available I listen to Weird Al.

Editor's Note: This research was supported by the
National Science Foundation (NSF), the
federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all
fields of science and engineering.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in
this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the National Science Foundation.See the ScienceLives archive.